MuuMuse: The Return of Natalia Kills

“We’re hell raising and we don’t need saving, ’cause there’s no salvation for a bad girl,” Kills warns above snarling, overdriven guitar and frantic yelps on “Problem,” the album’s lead single released today. Yep — definitely still a troublemaker.

As she explained before handing off a pair of earbuds to me to listen, half of Trouble is about being a troublemaker, and half is about being troubled. The songs that I heard yesterday were a shift sonically: Gone are the chilly synth-pop beats of “Love Is A Suicide” and “Mirrors.” In their place? Pounding Bhasker-produced drums, Emile Haynie yelps in the distance, sirens and overdriven guitars.

The songs I heard alternated between soldiering, anthemic midtempo tracks, including title track “Trouble” (think sort of Ryan Tedder meets fun., but with the darker cinematic quality of Lana Del Rey) and “Saturday Night,” which features a chorus that I’ve already got lodged in my brain (“It’s just another Saturday night…oh-OH-oh!“)

Rest assured, there are cuts for letting lose (“it’s not all depressing!” she joked.) The other half of the record is filled with bouyant, cocky pop tracks, describing them as “Missy Elliott or Gwen Stefani‘s ‘Hollaback Girl,’” including “Rabbit H***,” which she’s been singing live lately.

You can hear that playfulness on “Problem” as well, during the handclap-happy bridge toward the end of the song (“And we ain’t even at the beach, even at the beach…“). It’s the time to drop it low, twerk and whip that high ponytail.